I recently found myself in a friendly argument over the origins of the obesity epidemic. It (the argument, not the epidemic) started with a post on my Facebook page (scroll down to January 2), which itself came from this article on weight loss in the New York Times Magazine.

The argument was over how much of the rise in obesity can be attributed to genetics vs. environment. Anoop Balachandran, a fitness professional studying for his Ph.D. in exercise science, argues that it’s virtually all genetics, and makes his case on his blog in this post and this one. His biggest point is that the people who are obese today are the people who would’ve been obese anyway, and what we call an epidemic is a rise in their weight,…

Tags: Tags: body fat, dual intervention point model, energy balance, fat loss, genetics, lifestyle, obesity, set point theory, Weight Loss

On my worst days, I fantasize about cleaning my house with a shovel. It’s cluttered with so much useless crap that it would be impossible to sort out piece by piece. Better to just shovel it all out and not worry about whether we’ll miss any of it later. As it is, we often can’t find the stuff we need because it’s buried under all the stuff we don’t.

Case in point: Today I found a stack of Kids Discover magazines from 2006. And when I say I “found” them, I mean they were sitting on our dining-room table. It’s the first thing a visitor would see. How they got there is a mystery I’m unlikely to solve.

As long as they’re there, I had to look at them, and one of the themed issues caught my…

Tags: Tags: bad advice, body fat, conventional wisdom, diabetes, eggs, exercise, meat, nutrition, protein, weight control, Weight Loss